Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics

Intelligence in Recent Public Literature

Reviewed by John EhrmanNo matter how familiar a spy case may be, a
fresh look can usually bring new insights. Very often, however, authors
and practitioners limit themselves to drawing narrow lessons--usually
they study such cases as those of Aldrich Ames or Robert Hannsen in the
hope of learning how to stop future spies before they can wreak
comparable havoc. Sometimes, especially when looking at cases that
became great causes celebres, like those of Alfred Dreyfus, Alger Hiss,
or the Rosenbergs, historians and political scientists try to evaluate
a particular case's effects on politics, culture, and society. Seldom,
however, do authors attempt to use a comparative approach and present
several cases at once. This is unfortunate, for comparative studies of
espionage hold great promise for teasing new, broad lessons out of
well-worked ground.

In their new book, Early Cold War Spies,
historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr review the major espionage
cases of the early Cold War era, beginning with the Amerasia affair and
ending with the Soblen trial. By looking at how the cases were
understood at the time and then adding what has been learned about them
since the end of the Cold War, they "hope to better assess the history
of American politics and public opinion regarding communism and
anticommunism" during the 15 years following World War II (17). While
Haynes and Klehr fall somewhat short of this ambitious goal, their book
still is very good, both as an introductory text and as an example of
the promise that comparative study holds for expanding our
understanding of espionage, intelligence, and the political environment
in which they are carried out.

Intelligence officers are taught not to be
involved in politics. From the day they take their oaths--or earlier,
even, in application interviews--their managers and instructors
repeatedly tell them that they are to be nonpartisan in their work and
never to align themselves with any external political agendas. They are
taught that their roles are to collect and report information as
accurately as possible, and to analyze it without bias or
preconceptions. Indeed, in this belief system the highest achievement
is to deliver analysis that a consumer might find unpalatable, for it
confirms the integrity of the system and its officers. This is
especially true for officers working in counterintelligence and
counterespionage, who are trained to follow leads wherever they may go
and be prepared to take legal actions, no matter how unpleasant the
consequences might be.

Daily life, however, is more complicated.
Every intelligence agency is a part of the government, and their
activities are subject to the ebb and flow of political processes, as
anyone who has ever briefed a high-level Executive Branch customer or
member of Congress is well aware. Intelligence products are important
to the policymaking process, and various factions--in both the
executive and legislative branches, as well as outside of
government--seek to exploit them in debates; the Team A-Team B episode
in the 1970s is instructive in this regard. Similarly, the leaders of
intelligence agencies are shrewd political operators in their own
right, skilled at defending their agencies' interests, promoting
programs, obtaining resources, and manipulating public perceptions of
their work. The result is that the intelligence world is one with
complex, constantly shifting political dynamics. Individual officers
may seek to live up to their ideal of being outside of politics, but
they live in an environment in which politics are part of everyday life.

One of the more striking, although not
altogether surprising, aspects of intelligence politics is how the same
issues surface again and again. Many of the debates in American foreign
policy since 1945, and especially since 1991, have centered on how to
maintain the country's dominant position in the world. The result has
been recurrent debates about such issues as relative military power,
nuclear proliferation, economic competitiveness, and how to deal with
nondemocratic ideologies and rogue states. Intelligence plays a large
role in each of these questions, and criticisms of the Intelligence
Community's performance tend to be repeated in each cycle of debate. On
the collection side, complaints about the US over-reliance on technical
collection and the urgent need to improve human collection have been
heard for decades. Criticisms of analytical biases and procedures, poor
understandings of foreign cultures, and demands to increase the use of
alternative analyses and new methodologies are perennials--the
post-Iraq debates about how to improve analysis are not much different
from those that followed the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the Iranian
revolution in 1979, or the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In
each of these cases, public debates have gone over the same ground and
resolved little. The result appears to be a firm public perception that
US intelligence agencies are extraordinarily proficient at technical
collection, abysmal at espionage, and somewhere in between when it
comes to analysis.

The same is true in the world of
counterintelligence and counterespionage, where major cases have had
wide-ranging political effects. The best-known cases of the early Cold
War era, those of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, helped feed the growth
of McCarthyism and then took on long political lives of their own. They
still affect how the American right and left view each other, foreign
policy, and intelligence. After the 1950s, ideologically-motivated
spies almost disappeared from the United States, but their replacement
by troubled or mercenary characters like Jonathan Pollard, Ames, and
Hanssen did not lead to a separation of espionage and politics. After
Ames's arrest, for example, some members of Congress and prominent
intellectuals asked if the Ames affair, combined with the end of the
Cold War and what they claimed was the CIA's long record of
intelligence failures, showed that espionage and counterintelligence
were essentially pointless activities and wondered if the country would
be better off abolishing the CIA; others, for their parts, offered
countless suggestions for reforming the CIA. Even more politicized, in
1999 and 2000, was the Wen Ho Lee case, which took place at a time when
concerns about rising Chinese military power intersected with
Republican accusations that the Clinton administration was not tough
enough on Beijing. The result was that the investigation and
prosecution of the alleged Chinese spy was stoked--and compromised--by
a combination of journalists seeking to chase a hot story and
government officials willing to leak sensitive information. Such
behavior is common in Washington politics, only here it was applied to
what was supposed to be a professional, impartial investigation. 1

What this overview suggests is that the
politics of counterintelligence should be similar to those of
intelligence in general. Despite all the books and articles that have
been written on spy cases, however, few have noted this phenomenon or
sought to explore its roots or implications. The number of cases that
could be used for comparative studies is large, however, making the
field of counterintelligence politics ripe for exploration through
comparative analyses. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, therefore, are
in the fortunate position of being among the first to carry out such
research.

Haynes and Klehr are among the best
qualified historians to look at Cold War spy cases. Indeed, much of our
understanding of Soviet espionage in the United States during the 1930s
and 1940s is a result of their previous collaborations. Both are
experts in the history of the Communist Party of the United States
(CPUSA) and in two books, The Secret World of American Communism (1995)
and The Soviet World of American Communism (1998), they used material
from newly-opened Soviet archives not only to document how Moscow
controlled the party, but also how the leadership of the CPUSA
willingly allowed the USSR to use it as an espionage apparatus. In a
third book, Venona (1999), they described in detail the networks and
individual Soviet spies whose operations the Venona program uncovered,
filling in many of the blank spots in previous histories.

In Early Cold War Spies, Haynes and Klehr
present their material in a straightforward, chronological order. They
begin with the two episodes that alerted US authorities to the extent
of Soviet espionage, the Amerasia case and the defection of Soviet code
clerk Igor Gouzenko in Canada. They then move briskly through the cases
that grew out of Elizabeth Bentley's information, the Hiss case, the
Rosenbergs and the other atomic espionage cases, the botched
prosecution of Judith Coplon, and finish with the little-known
Soble-Soblen case. The facts of all these cases now are well settled;
Haynes and Klehr present no new research or material but, rather,
provide accounts that readers new to the cases or with little
background in counterintelligence will find to be clear, concise, and
useful for later reference. For those who want more depth, Haynes and
Klehr provide an annotated bibliography at the end of each chapter,
pointing readers to the major books and materials for each case.

The main theme that Haynes and Klehr follow
through their narratives is that the difficulty the government had in
establishing investigatory and evidentiary procedures for spy cases
meant that the public's understanding of Soviet espionage was
significantly distorted. In the late 1940s, the procedures for
investigating espionage cases, presenting evidence in court, and
protecting classified evidence used in espionage trials still were
unclear. (It took more than 30 years, until the passage of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978 and the Classified Information
Procedures Act in 1980, to create a clear set of rules.) Until then,
Haynes and Klehr point out, the government often chose not to present
the full story behind its prosecutions or was forced to let spies go
unprosecuted, either because evidence had been gathered illegally or
because no standard procedure existed to protect classified information
from defense lawyers' threats to expose it in court. Consequently, the
government was vulnerable to charges that it was conducting
politically-motivated trials based on stories invented by unreliable
witnesses. In the Amerasia case, Haynes and Klehr write, because the
government could not present its evidence collected from warrentless
searches, it "was accused of 'red-baiting,' engaging in vendettas
against whistleblowers, and trying to muzzle reporters," while
Elizabeth Bentley "was pilloried by historians and journalists as a
neurotic, alcoholic fantasist who lied, exaggerated, and embellished
her story" (34, 82). Thus, until all the evidence was released in the
1990s and the full stories of these spy cases became clear, historians
did not know the true nature of Soviet espionage in the 1940s. As a
result of this, and their increasing skepticism during the 1960s and
1970s of government accounts, academics writing on the spy cases often
accused the FBI of "orchestrating a witch-hunt of innocent people"
(233).

Haynes and Klehr conclude with an effort to
apply the lessons of early Cold War espionage cases to current
government efforts to cope with terrorist threats. Just as in the late
1940s and 1950s, they point out, the government faces the need to
update the rules and procedures for investigations, as well as the
requirement to decide how much sensitive information to release to the
public to bolster its claims of serious threats. The government now
faces the "same dilemmas [as] in several of the early cold war spy
trials where defense lawyers demanded disclosure of counterintelligence
information that the government insists would seriously harm its
efforts to protect the public against terrorist attacks." This, they
note, is simply a new manifestation of the problem the American form of
government has deciding how to deal with serious internal threats while
still striking the "proper balance between security and liberty" (p.
240).

Haynes and Klehr make reasonable points but,
in keeping with their goals for Early Cold War Spies, limited ones. The
lesson that incomplete disclosures can distort the public's
understanding of espionage and cast doubt on the accuracy of other
intelligence-related information is correct and well worth remembering.
More intriguing, however, are the additional observations Haynes and
Klehr make in passing. Taken together, these show the promise that
comparative studies hold for understanding the links between
counterintelligence and politics.

What stands out most clearly from the cases
Haynes and Klehr present is how cyclical the patterns of major
espionage cases are. In each, numerous actors insert themselves, with
each trying to advance their own interests. In the case of Elizabeth
Bentley, for example, her information was of little intelligence value
when it became public in 1948--the Russians had long before shut down
the networks with which she had been associated and withdrawn most of
their intelligence officers from the United States, while the FBI and
Justice Department had concluded their investigations and decided not
to prosecute most of the individuals identified through her leads.
Nonetheless, the FBI and House Un-American Activities Committee were
happy to have Bentley tell her story in public, as it bolstered their
views of the Soviet threat and the need for strong internal security
measures. The press, meanwhile, happily played up the charges of the
"red spy queen," as Bentley was dubbed by the tabloids, to sell
newspapers. This combination of political manipulation and
sensationalism has occurred repeatedly since the 1940s, most recently
in the Wen Ho Lee case. Finally, and usually later in a case,
intellectuals like to become involved, trying to use it to support
their broader cultural, political, and social analyses. 2

These are not the only aspects of the
politics of counterintelligence that appear repeatedly. Haynes and
Klehr describe another behavior that has repeated itself regularly: in
their introduction to the atomic espionage cases, they note that while
some critics denounced the cases as witch hunts, others used them to
call for a "long-overdue focus on a more rigorous counterespionage
program" (138). Indeed, when a major case becomes public, it usually is
followed by revelations of poor security or personnel practices,
Congressional investigations, and plans for reforms. But as publicity
wanes and new issues arise to consume public attention, the reforms are
put on the back burner; eventually, old habits and practices reassert
themselves. This pattern has been displayed most recently at the
Department of Energy which, after all the attention focused on its
counterintelligence and security practices during the Lee case, was
forced to institute extensive polygraph requirements for its employees.
The requirement, however, was largely rolled back in the fall of 2006. 3

Early Cold War Spies is an introductory work
and it would be unreasonable to expect it to begin looking too deeply
at all of the issues growing out of the cases it describes.
Nonetheless, the material it covers hints at some rich possibilities
for future research on the politics of counterintelligence. The
consistent, repetitive nature of reactions to spy cases points to views
and behavior deeply rooted in American political culture. Understanding
these, and perhaps comparing them to the ways other political cultures
view and react to espionage, might suggest paths to improved
investigations and prosecutions, or at least reductions in the damage
to intelligence operations that come from the resulting political
maneuvering. It would be especially useful given the likelihood that
our counterterrorism efforts will lead to a new generation of spy cases
and the possibility that we might avoid repeating some of the errors of
the Cold War.

1.
Edward Jay Eptstein, "On the Team," New
Republic, March 28, 1994; Caleb Carr, "Aldrich Ames and the Conduct of
American Intelligence," World Policy Journal, Fall 1994; David
Ignatius, "Downspying the CIA," Washington Post, March 5, 1995; "The
Times and Wen Ho Lee," New York Times, September 26, 2000.

2.
For good examples of how intellectuals used
early Cold War spy cases in their debates, see Leslie Fiedler, "Hiss,
Chambers, and the Age of Innocence," Commentary, December 1950, and
"Afterthoughts on the Rosenbergs," Encounter, October 1953, both
reprinted in Fiedler, An End to Innocence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955);
and Robert Warshow, "The `Idealism' of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,"
Commentary, November 1953, reprinted in Warshow, The Immediate
Experience (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1962). These may be compared
usefully with a more recent example, Gabriel Schoenfeld, "How Inept is
the FBI?" Commentary, May 2002.

3.
For the Energy Department and the polygraph,
see "Energy Department Polygraph Program Expanded," Washington Post,
October 14, 2000; "Polygraphs for Nuclear Weapons Workers," New York
Times, October 5, 2006.

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